What is the proper role of government?

I was just listening to an NPR show discussing Ron Paul supporters who cheered at the idea of letting people without health insurance die.

One of the points that came up on the NPR show is that the Democrats do not have a coherent message on the proper role of government.

Republicans do have a coherent message. They want the law of karma to function: you should reap what you sow. You should not reap what other people sow. They love Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper. The ant works hard, the grasshopper does not. Then winter comes and the grasshopper starves to death. Republicans want the grasshopper to starve, and that's why Ron Paul supporters cheered at the idea of letting someone die. They do not want the ant to be forced to share with the grasshopper, ever.

So government's role, in the Republican view, should be pretty much limited to protection of individual property -- but there is a very important and always unspoken addendum: no matter how that property was acquired.

The very rich absolutely love this idea of never having to share no matter how they got their money, and so rich Republicans generously fund campaigns which appeal to poor and racist Republicans who fear having to share with minorities.

Democrats, in contrast, want to "promote the general welfare" of the country, as is explicitly written into the constitution. Their assumption is that we are all in the same boat, and we have responsibilities to each other. But then it gets very hazy. Exactly what are these responsibilities to each other, and who is going to pay for them?

Rent does not just mean rent paid to a landlord. Interest is also the rent paid on borrowed money. The point is that "rent" here means money you get merely by being the owner of something, not from doing productive work. It means money that you could "earn" even if you were in a coma, taking it by law from people who actually did the work.

The difference is not always obvious. When you literally pay rent to a landlord, which is it? Is it reward for the landlord's productive work, or is the landlord just leeching off the tenant?

The answer is both. The construction and maintenance of the building is productive work, and should be rewarded with a certain amount of rent. But the payment of the rest of the rent for the use of the land is completely non-productive. No one created the land. The landlord merely uses his ownership title, without work, to extract money from productive people.

So back to the proper role of government. Should the ant have to feed the grasshopper in the winter?

To answer that, you need to ask one more question: Did the ant get his money from his own work, or from rents?

Money from his own work should belong to the ant. But money from rents should be heavily taxed and used to benefit the society the rent was extracted from. This is the idea behind Georgism.

Finally, back to health insurance. Should the person who refuses to buy health insurance be allowed to die? The answer is that non-productive rent income should be heavily taxed and used to fund universal critical care coverage for every citizen, like other countries already have. So there would be no people without critical-care coverage and the issue would not arise.

The ants would have no basis for complaint, because the health insurance money would not come from any productive work which they did themselves, and they themselves would be entitled to the same coverage.

So the role of government should be the protection of individual property acquired through productive work, and the promotion of the general welfare via revenue from taxes on non-productive rent-seeking.

But what about unearned, inhereted wealth? Do we really want a permanent aristocracy in this country?

That has nothing to do with "don't subsidize a behavior". This is more of a tax question, different topic all together.

We had a housing bubble because government started subsidizing house buying, they still do to much extend which is why that market is so fubar and will never get better. Same goes for education, healthcare.... government gets into it and they screw it up.

But doesn't that make all farmers parasites, by definition? And the same would be true for all resource extraction (wood, coal, oil, metals)?

Farmers labor to produce wealth (food) from the inputs. That labor is not parasitical at all.

To the extent they strip nutrients from the soil they would owe a severance tax on the land. And to the extent they are enjoying income from land itself they might be subject to a "share the wealth" income tax if I were Dictator (since we all don't have the opportunity to own enough land to live off of, 400 million acres of cropland / 100 million households is only 4 acres per household).

Funny how the descendants sitting on 640+ acres of good land given away by the government 100+ years ago are now the biggest anti-government conservatives around.

I would be too, for Barry Goldwater wasn't always wrong about the stuff he was saying . . .

As for natural resources, the secret socialists up in Alaska have the right idea with the royalties. As do the Norwegians, who have aggressively socialized their oil sector and now enjoy $100,000 PER CAPITA set aside in global equity funds, earmarked to cover old-age pensions.

Same goes for education, healthcare.... government gets into it and they screw it up.

Not always. Would you want to completely eliminate public elementary schools? Without them, the poor would have no schools at all. And that would harm us all in the long run. Our system of a public education option with private competition is pretty good.

Where I really agree with you is that the government should not subsidize payments for anything. That just makes prices go up because it increases demand and not supply.

So if the government just gave every family $10,000 to pay for private schools, what would happen? The price of private school would go up by $10,000. The rich students would still go to the same rich schools (but their schools would get extra money), and the poor would be right back where they were simply handing over their tuition voucher. Much better to simply increase the supply by having public schools with no tuition cost.

Total "free marketism" is a religion. The reality is that markets sometimes fail:

$20 would shut down the ability to ship food from rural areas into the city too. It takes ALOT of energy/gas to run a city like new york city. I'd assume that $20 gas would see a mass exodus from the city and into the small town were food/shelter and clothing can all be created locally. I'd think that prohibitively expense gas would create a shift back towards an agrarian society no?

Not always. Would you want to completely eliminate public elementary schools?...

No, I think we are saying the same thing.

I do think they are screwing up education big time. College education is expensive because of huge amount of checks government is giving out. Lower education is screwed up because government is paying unions for attendance, not actual education. CA schools are a huge mess, mismanaged, widespread fraud. Way too many officials in the system just look the other way, and they will keep on doing so until the system collapses out of sheer greed and corruption.

Gold does not "impose the required honesty" it just sits there on a table, you could be a genocidal Austrian and it would not object

The point is that gold is a barometer that can indicate clearly if the government is taking part in chicanery. They are doing it now, distorting all kinds of data. Do you really perceive the chicanery directly today?

College education is expensive because of huge amount of checks government is giving out. Lower education is screwed up because government is paying unions for attendance, not actual education.

True on both counts.

As for higher education, I say we should create a single, large, national, virtual university. There is no need for a campus or for physical books. Do a complete online learning experience. Pay an author $1 million to write the best damn Calculus, European History, Economics 101, Quantum Mechanics 407, etc. book. Peer review the crap out of the learning materials and come up with standardize course curriculums.

Sure the initial set up would be expensive, but the average cost per bachelor degree would be on the order of $100 within ten years. Imagine being able to get any bachelors, masters, or PhD degree for just $100 plus the time and effort to do the work.

In the information age, the transfer of knowledge should be dirt cheap.

Agree. The problem is, too many powerful, smart people in the universities would lose their paychecks.

I'd rather pay them for production or research than teaching. Plus, professor salaries are only a small portion of the cost of education. Books, physical campus, profit taking by college, bank profit taking, etc. all adds up to considerable cost. We could keep the professors employed at the same rate in other areas and still save a lot of money.

If you are teaching subject X and X is worth teaching, then subject X must have some useful value in industry Y. So simply work for industry Y.

College should be about teaching useful skills and preparing the workforce. So there's no reason we shouldn't be able to retrain those professors for industry work or research.

> Plus, professor salaries are only a small portion of the cost of education...

And this has been a shrinking % in the whole pie (of expenses). In another thread it was indicated that one of the rapidy increasing parts of the expense universities face is for administrators' salaries.

Pay an author $1 million to write the best damn Calculus, European History, Economics 101, Quantum Mechanics 407, etc. book. Peer review the crap out of the learning materials and come up with standardize course curriculums.

I think some very fine textbooks could come out of the Wikipedia. Seriously. It already competes pretty well with the Encyclopedia Britannica.

I myself have often wanted to correct textbooks when I found errors in them.

So no need to even pay $1M for each textbook.

I totally agree about standardized course curriculums. The undergrad material could and should be standard. Then you just study, take tests, and get your degree.

Of course the highly paid university administrators are not going to like this one bit.

The guys who say that renting is smarter than owning, and only fools own, also denigrate the landlords as parasites. Which is it, is an owner a fool or a rich parasite? How can one enjoy the carefree renter lifestyle without a landlord willing to buy the place and rent it out? If there a huge tax on owning land, then landlords won't want to own places to rent out.

Sorry, the argument that the value is in the land is bogus. Nobody is going to rent an empty lot.

Now, if there's a monopoly on land, and nobody has the freedom to choose who to obtaining housing services from, we have a problem...but that does not appear to be a serious situation in the united states today.

There are exactly zero resources which any human being created. The value is entirely in terms of converting those resources to usable goods:

- Forests turn to lumber
- Land turns to housing and other buildings, food, or transportation corridors
- Underground turns to coal, iron, and other minerals

Yes, natural resource ownership is a complicated subject, and the people who live in an area where the natural resource comes from should be fairly compensated for it (usually in the form of taxes on the resource's assessed value), but I still don't see any argument here as to how land ownership is any different from fishing, logging, or mining rights.

If a person builds housing units and offers them for rent, they are providing an essential service. This is not predatory, evil, or even remotely inappropriate. To call it "parasitic" is downright absurd.

The guys who say that renting is smarter than owning, and only fools own, also denigrate the landlords as parasites. Which is it, is an owner a fool or a rich parasite? How can one enjoy the carefree renter lifestyle without a landlord willing to buy the place and rent it out? If there a huge tax on owning land, then landlords won't want to own places to rent out.

Thank you my friend, I have been wondering this for a while now but I wanted to watch and see how many of them would go on saying two completely opposing opinions in the same breath practically.

Face it: although Obama did NOT cause this economic melt-down, he has done NOTHING OTHER than CONTRIBUTE TO IT. Hence, HE is JUST as responsible now, four years into the fact, as Bush was in creating it.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Obama. But, there's not really much he (or any president) can do to revive an economy that's suffering from the collapse of a debt-fueled bubble-based economy. After an artificial boom comes a disasterous "hangover" of debt repayment and liquidation of mis-allocated resources.

To Obama's credit, he has not put forth big tax increases. There's a good case for raising the taxes on the "super-rich" like Warren Buffet. Even Buffet agrees. But Obama didn't do that. On economic issues, Obama isn't much different than a moderate Republican.

"In a nutshell, my argument is that rent-extraction can avoid these limits by aligning itself to the progressive agenda – the very programs that purport to help the masses become the source of rents for the classes."

Section 8 rentals is a prime -- canonical, even -- example of that. This subsidy is pushing $20B/yr, or $15/month per household in the US. Small enough to "fly under the radar" as the guy said, but man is it fucked up.

The GOOD people will each be given about one months mortgage payment and banks will be given immunity for largest fraud case in history.

We will get only the government that we demand.

So we have to unify and demand good government. How can we most effectively do that? The left-right split is used very effectively to divide us and prevent us from challenging the corporate control of government.

So we have to unify and demand good government. How can we most effectively do that? The left-right split is used very effectively to divide us and prevent us from challenging the corporate control of government.

Direct democracy instead of representative? I'm not sure it is a net plus, but it seems our system guarantees that, once elected, the Representatives can vote different than their campaign promises, make sweetheart deals for contributors, feather their own nests and run for re-election. Often times, they'll know they will be the winner next time too, unless they are in a district that is evenly split.

I think ballot initiatives show us another facet of Direct democracy. That said, I don't see a way out as long as the Pols need money to fuel reelection, and they know that you'll decide you're better off with them, despite what they don't do, than you are with their opponent, based on what they MIGHT do.

I love the idea of direct democracy. We would then have no one to blame but ourselves, directly.

I'm sure the idea of rule by the 100% is horrifying to the 1%.

But also, when I float the idea, I often get the reaction "OMG, you mean let just anyone vote directly on laws? Like the people I'm in line with at the DMV? No way!"

So there is also a general mistrust that the 100% is smart enough to do the right thing.

How will you stop the 51% from voting in themselves money from the other 49%?

I think our system now is flawed because of the big government, but giving everyone a vote might just make the bad system a lot worse making everyone equally poor instead. Such a society would not progress at all.

How will you stop the 51% from voting in themselves money from the other 49%?

This is America! The rich are beloved as examples of virtue for all humanity and the poor blame only themselves for what the rich manage to take from them. So that's not the problem.

The problem is that we currently have the 1% voting themselves money from the 99%. BIG TIME. Your taxes go to Wall Street bonuses, the Federal Reserve prints up money to buy bad bonds from the 1%, and endless layers of legislation guarantee that all profits are privatized while all losses are socialized.